As a boy, Danny Marshall dreamed of following in his father’s footsteps or, more accurately, in his gaff tracks.

He wanted to be an electric lineman.

Greg Marshall, who spent nearly four decades climbing poles and turning the lights back on as a lineman for United Electric Cooperative, always tried to talk him out of it.

“As a kid, I wanted to do what Dad did,” Danny recalls, “and he would always say, ‘Don’t do it, unless you want to have bad knees and a bad back. Don’t do it.’”

Danny didn’t listen — and today, he’s a line crew chief for the same cooperative.

Sitting at a cluttered table in the crew room at United Electric’s headquarters in DuBois, Greg, now retired, leans back in his chair and explains why he tried to dissuade
his son.

“I didn’t want to encourage him because I knew what he was going to have to give up timewise and the sacrifices he would have to put up with,” he says. “It is a really good career, but it’s got to be something you want to do.

“I didn’t want to push him that way. It had to be his choice.”

During high school, Danny considered enlisting in the military. His mother strongly opposed that path. So father and son had a heart-to-heart to discuss the younger Marshall’s future.

“The conversation was: ‘Your Mom really doesn’t want you to go in the military,’ ” Danny recalls. “ ‘What are you gonna do when you get out?’ And I was like, ‘Maybe do what you do.’ ”

BORN FOR THIS: Josh Heess Jr., left, an apprentice lineman for Sullivan County Rural Electric Cooperative (REC) in Forksville, is a third generation lineworker. He’s following in the footsteps of his father, Josh Sr., right, and his grandfather, Jud Benjamin, who worked at Sullivan County REC for more than 40 years. Photo courtesy of Jeff Fetzer
 

A perfect fit

Conversations like the one between Greg and Danny Marshall have played out at kitchen tables across the country since the dawn of electric co-ops.

Ironically, for the Gutshall family in Huntingdon County, the discussion didn’t happen at all.

Josh Gutshall, now a journeyman lineman in his ninth year with Huntingdon-based Valley Rural Electric Cooperative (REC), always thought he’d like to be a lineman like his dad, Steve, a veteran crew leader, also with Valley REC. But when he graduated from high school, the cooperative had a nepotism policy that precluded him from working there.

So after graduating from Huntingdon High School in 2013, Josh stayed local, taking a job stacking lumber at a local sawmill. That was followed by work at an auto garage, a fiberglass container manufacturing company and a heavy equipment rental business, where he received his commercial driver’s license.

After learning that Valley REC had an opening for an apprentice lineworker and that it had rescinded its nepotism policy, Josh filled out an application, but neglected to tell his father.

Steve, however, heard about his son’s pending job interview from Rich Bauer, the co-op’s president & CEO. “They gave him a shot,” the proud dad says, “and I am very grateful.”

Josh began work as an apprentice in the co-op’s Shade Gap district in 2017, and now works out of the Huntingdon district office with his father, who plans to retire early next year.

Steve admits he never tried to steer Josh into line work for a couple of reasons. First, he didn’t think his son would have an opportunity because of Valley’s nepotism policy.

“And there is a lot of sacrifice,” the father of five says. “Our kids were all in sports, and their dad didn’t get to see a lot of that because I was always working.”

That sacrifice of family time — missed birthday parties, holiday gatherings, and kids’ sporting events due to outage call-outs — was one of the main reasons Rex McRoberts gave up his position on the line crew at Adams Electric Cooperative. After seven years, he traded line work to be a staking technician with the Gettysburg-based co-op.
 

Rex’s son, Eric, was a young boy when his father hung up his climbing hooks for good and has little memory of his dad’s days as a lineman. It was not a trade he had considered. Instead, with encouragement from his father, he decided to seek an electrical engineering degree.

“I went to Penn State York for a year and found out that college just didn’t fit me,” Eric says, “so I gave it up.”

His father suggested he become a lineman.

“I had never thought of that,” Eric says. “I guess I didn’t really know what he did as a lineman or what was involved with the job.”

Rex arranged for Eric to join one of the line crews at Adams Electric for a ride-along — a chance to see firsthand what line work was all about.

“Well, that was it,” Eric says. “You bring any kid on a ride-along and that’s it. It’s fun. The guys all like what they do. It’s like a little club, and you can’t help wanting to be a part of something like that.”

He saw the job was more than poles and wire and bucket trucks. It was about camaraderie, problem-solving, and getting a job done through trust and teamwork.

It was a perfect fit for Eric.

After graduating from a two-year lineman training program, he was hired as an apprentice with Tri-County REC, headquartered in Mansfield, Pa. He learned, advanced to journeyman, then to crew chief. For years, the job was ideal, but as the father of two athletic daughters, the overtime work — typically 300 to 500 hours a year — began to weigh on him. He missed many of his girls’ games and lots of family time, too.

The year Eric’s oldest daughter entered high school, he made a decision that echoed the one his father had made decades earlier. He stepped away from line work and into an office role.

“Both of my girls were always heavy into sports, and that’s the only reason I’m in the office today instead of working with the line crew,” says McRoberts, the co-op’s director of operations. “I wanted to watch them play, and I’ve been able to see every sporting event they’ve been in for the past six, eight years.”
 

A family tradition

For 23-year-old Josh Heess Jr., single and with no kids, the long hours are a big part of the appeal of line work.

In fact, the Sullivan County REC apprentice lineman says after-hours work and the accompanying overtime pay are what he enjoys most about the job.

Josh Jr. knew early on that line work was his calling. His father, Josh Heess Sr., is a lineman/troubleshooter for Penelec, and his grandfather, Jud Benjamin, worked more than 40 years as a lineman at the same cooperative.

“I got into it because of my dad,” he admits. “We talked about it a bit when I was still in school, and then when I got out of high school, I tried going into the Penelec training program.”

At the time, Penelec’s training school accepted only 20 students a year out of roughly 400 applicants. Josh Jr. completed a two-week climbing school in Erie and advanced to the final 25, but ultimately wasn’t selected.

“You have to wait a year to try again,” he says, “so in the meantime, I went to work in the oil field as a roughneck for Patterson UTI in Ohio. Then this job opened up, and I got it.”

Now in his third year of a four-year apprenticeship, Josh Jr. says he’s proud to carry on the family tradition. His father is proud, too.

“When he got into the oil field work, I didn’t know if he’d come back,” Josh Sr. says. “But I always hoped he would get into line work. Everybody wants what’s good for their kids, and it is a good career — it really is.”

While no two journeys into the trade look exactly alike, the pull of the work sounds remarkably similar: The camaraderie of the crew. The hum of a bucket truck. The satisfaction of watching lights flick back on in a neighbor’s home.

Despite long hours, the physical demands and the inherent dangers of working with high-voltage electricity, sometimes in brutal weather, none of them talk about their calling with regret. Instead, all you hear is pride and passion.

Powerfully rewarding, powerfully dangerous

So what is the appeal of line work?

“Honestly, I like all of it,” says Steve Gutshall. “It’s very rewarding, especially doing trouble calls — going to an area and it’s dark and then coming back and everything is lit up. It’s a good feeling.”

That moment — when the lights flick back on — is a constant theme.

“You know the members are hurting,” Greg Marshall says. “They don’t have heat … they don’t have water. Just seeing the appreciation when you turn the lights on — that’s the most rewarding part of the job.”

While linemen get a lot of satisfaction from power restoration work, Eric McRoberts notes there’s also a lot of pride in building something tangible.

“Line work is such a rewarding job,” he says, “because you’re either fixing an outage or saying, ‘Hey, we just built that line right down through there. That’s what we did today.’ ”

But line work comes with risks and that reality shapes the culture as much as anything else.

“You are doing dangerous work,” says Josh Heess Sr., “so you’ve all got to get along, and you’ve all got to trust each other at the same time. You have to look out for them. They are your brothers.”

For Steve Gutshall, that trust carries extra weight when family is involved.

“When you’re a crew chief, you worry about everyone on the crew,” he says. “But when your son comes to work and you know the dangers that are potentially out there, you want to make sure everybody is going to be all right and be able to go home at the end of the day.”

‘It could happen to any of us’

Back in the crew room at United Electric, Danny Marshall says the dangers of the job became painfully real on a cold day in January 2021, when a mayday call came over the radio.

His friend and fellow United Electric lineman, Branden Bauer, brushed his arm against a 7,200-volt energized line and was electrocuted. He survived, but the accident resulted in the amputation of both of his hands and ended his career as a lineman.

“I wasn’t on the crew when it happened,” Danny says quietly, “but when we got the mayday call, we all swarmed to the scene. That was the worst day of my career.”

Close in age to Branden, Danny says the incident changed him. It drove home the message, he says, that he isn’t invincible and caused him to pay more attention to safety.

“Branden was one of the best linemen here,” Danny says. “I realized that if that can happen to him, it could happen to me and it could happen to any of us.”

With a wife and two young sons at home, Danny knows his family counts on him to return home safely at the end of each day. He also says that if either of his sons wants to become a third-generation lineworker when they’re older, he would welcome that.

“If that’s what they really wanted to do, yes, I would encourage them,” he says, glancing at his father and smiling.

“If I hadn’t become a lineman, I don’t know what I would be doing,” Danny adds. “I would be pretty lost, I guess.”

Greg Marshall leans forward in his chair. It’s his turn to smile.

“I am very pleased with the way he’s progressed in his life and proud of what he’s accomplished,” Greg says. “It kind of hits the spot that somebody wants to follow in what you did.”

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